Ele­men­tary

Sun­day, 8.30pm, Ten Imag­ine Sher­lock Holmes in present-day New York, snap­ping ev­i­dence on his mo­bile phone, look­ing things up on Google, and run­ning around out­smart­ing the po­lice with his un­canny de­duc­tive rea­son­ing. Es­sen­tially this is the plot of Ele­men­tary, which de­buts tonight. A nice twist is that while Holmes is an agree­ably up­dated ver­sion of the char­ac­ter, played by Jonny Lee Miller ( Eli Stone, Dex­ter ), Dr Wat­son is a woman. That’s Joan Wat­son, former sur­geon (a fact de­duced by Holmes tonight be­cause her hands smell like beeswax) played by Lucy Liu ( Chicago, Dirty Sexy Money). The set-up is that he is a re­cov­er­ing ad­dict and she has been as­signed by his fa­ther to live with Holmes as a sort of ad­dict sit­ter to make sure he does not re­lapse. The plan is for her to be with him for six weeks. I guess time will tell how the orig­i­nal premise gets su­per­seded.